44May 2015
L
IKE most Labour and Social
Democrat parties Labour was
originally established by the
Trade Unions to advance the
political interests of trade
unionists and workers generally. When
founded in  it had the joint name of
the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union
Congress. The British Liberal Govern-
ment had promised Home Rule. James
Connolly, James Larkin and William
O’Brien wanted Labour to play a full
role in the eagerly expected Irish
Parliament.
Most trade unions in the Republic are
affiliated to Labour, but most trade
unionists and workers voted for Sinn
Féin in the - period, in later
decades for Fianna Fáil, and these days
they are moving towards another Sinn
Féin again.
Labour’s failure to get the votes of its
natural working-class constituency is
due to its ”economism” and the percep-
tion that it has historically been
“anti-national”. The economism refers
to Labour purporting to concentrate on
seeking economic improvements for
workers, while leaving the big political
issues to the two “bourgeois” parties
that came from the - Civil War.
The anti-nationalism refers to the fact
that the main Irish political issue of the
past century has been the establish-
ment of an Irish State, maintaining that
State’s independence and sovereignty
and seeking Irish reunification. Labour
has failed to make these issues its own
and left them instead to the same Civil
War parties and to various shades of
Republicanism.
James Connolly’s main contribution
to political thought was to show by his
writings and his participation in the
Easter Rising that Labour, the political
Left and people who claimed to be
socialists should seek to be the fore-
most advocates of national
independence – in that way winning
hegemony over the nation as a whole.
Sadly, his successors as Labour leaders
either did not understand him or failed
to follow him.
Labour opted not to contest the
hugely important  and  elec-
tions, the first elections in which
women had the vote and which deter-
mined people’s politics for generations.
If in  Labour had opted to abstain
from Westminster as Sinn Féin had
pledged to do, it would have won for
itself an influential and possibly a
determining role in the dramatic events
that followed, leading to the establish-
ment of an Irish State. Belfast’s workers
were Unionists, Southern ones were
Nationalist. Labour sought to maintain
the organisational unity of the All-Ire-
land Trade Union Movement by ceding
the whole field of politics to Sinn Féin.
As Peadar O’Donnell put it: “We lost the
whole of Ireland for the sake of Belfast”.
In the s when the Republican
Congress movement tried to push
Fianna Fáil in a more Republican and
anti-imperialist direction from the left,
Labour proclaimed that it stood for the
“Workers’ Republic” and would have no
truck with any mere “Republic” that
was not socialist. When that moment
had passed, it hastily dropped the
slogan “Workers’ Republic” in face of
criticism by the Church authorities of
the day, which saw that as communism.
For most of the seventy years since
the end of World War  the Labour
Party under successive leaders – Wil-
liam Norton, Brendan Corish, Michael
O’Leary, Dick Spring, Ruairi Quinn, Pat
Rabbite and Eamon Gilmore – has been
said to be more “the mudguard of Fine
Gael than the vanguard of the proletar-
iat”. By forming a whole series of
coalitions with Fine Gael, the more con-
servative of the Republic’s two main
parties, Labour has periodically revived
Fine Gael by putting it into government,
while enabling Fianna Fáil to renew
itself in opposition. Labour spokesmen
like to deplore the dominance of Irish
The reliable mudguard of Fine Gael.
By Anthony Coughlan
Labouring
under
delusions
POLITICS Labour Party
Labour’s
leaders could
not wait.
Better to
be Tánaiste
today than
potentially
Taoiseach
tomorrow
“